Understandably frustrating, especially if you’re new to investing. But it’s expected that the market will have both ups and downs.

The best advice I can give is to choose a good investment allocation and then stick to it. Contribute as much as you can each pay period or month and avoid looking at your balance as much as possible. You should figure out a rebalancing strategy, and you’ll probably need to look at your account to do that. Also, see The Best Order of Operations For Saving For Retirement.

Right now you have unrealized losses, but you haven’t actually lost any money (i.e., you have no “realized losses”) until you withdraw it. As it’s a retirement account and you just started it, I assume you aren’t planning to retire in the next decade, much less the next three years.

Is this your only retirement account? If so, why have you not been continuing to add money to it? If you wait to do that until the market recovers, you’ll lose out on all the gains between now and then.

I know you haven’t said you’re considering selling, but I recommend you check out the “Maintain Discipline” section of the Bogleheads investment philosophy, just in case that’s on your mind. I also recommend that you read up on dollar cost averaging (if you’re investing in a retirement plan every pay period, you’re already doing this).

You pointed out that the entire market has been impacted. I haven’t personally been paying attention in enough detail to confirm that (and my accounts that I just checked have gone up about 10% over the past three years, not down), but if so, that means you could change your asset allocation without selling low and buying high. I’m not saying you should change it, but if you take the time to learn about different investment strategies and decide a different one works for you, it’s nice to not have to sell your current investments while they’re underperforming relative to your new investments. (On the other hand, you can always change the allocation for your future investments without worrying about that.)

1. I was showing that my understanding of the word “asset” was based in fact. The 4th definition wasn’t relevant to that.
2. I literally talked about the 4th definition in the next paragraph.

If anyone’s operating in bad faith, it’s you. Are you drunk? You’re being an intentionally obtuse pedant and a liar (by your own definition). Try replying once you’ve sobered up, clown. Once you reread and realize how much of a dick you were, I’m sure you’ll apologize - unless I’m right about you being too much of a coward to admit when you’re wrong about something.

You could try reading the rest of my comment first.

Before I reply to your comment, I’d like to share this link. It didn’t change any of my existing understanding because Linus’s comment already made it clear that this was out of their hands, but maybe it’ll help clarify something for you.

I realize now that this comment on that post was made before this one (“What's free about delisting maintainers based on their country of residence?”) by the same person. It’s disingenuous for someone to act like this is about “country of residence” when they already engaged with a post clarifying that it’s because of sanctions against specific companies.

that you unironically think asset means property

I unironically think that because it does mean that:

1. assets plural

a. the property of a deceased person subject by law to the payment of his or her debts and legacies

b. the entire property of a person, association, corporation, or estate applicable or subject to the payment of debts

2. ADVANTAGE, RESOURCE

a. an item of value owned

b. assets plural the items on a balance sheet showing the book value of property owned

When I do a search for “state asset,” the results I get are all related to property, resources, etc., things that belong to and can be exploited by the state - for example https://www.epa.gov/dwcapacity/state-asset-management-initiatives-documents

Searching for “asset” specifically I see a tertiary definition reading “A spy working in his or her own country and controlled by the enemy” as well as the wikipedia definition, but that still means “spy,” not “paid lobbyist.”

just that incredibly obtuse

I’d apologize for not being well versed enough in counter-intelligence lingo to properly interpret the comment, but even with a proper interpretation, the comment I replied to was still incoherent, so I’m not really sure what you expect here.

It feels weird to say that it was incredibly obtuse of me to not spend more time trying to figure out what someone meant when they were, as far as I can tell just mad that Linus and other Linux maintainers didn’t ignore what their attorneys advised, regardless of what impact that might have had on them personally, and spouting a bunch of nonsense as a result.

Maybe I’m wrong, though. If so, would you care to explain how this was a violation of the GPL and/or how all of the 4 freedoms I listed were violated?

Feel free to argue it in court

Sadly, there are plenty of instances of drivers who killed pedestrians doing just that and succeeding. Heck, in two cases the pedestrian was on the sidewalk or inside a building.

• https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/charlottesville-driver-found-not-guilty-of-ivy-road-pedestrian-death/article_f6620862-b94d-11ed-8e8e-2bdbe8368a37.html
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/bus-driver-found-not-guilty-in-pedestrian-death-1.1362139
• https://www.kolotv.com/content/news/Reno-police-investigating-pedestrian-injury-accident-on-Plumb-Lane--427602243.html
• https://www.capecodtimes.com/story/news/2019/01/04/driver-found-not-guilty-in/6376784007/
• https://www.indaily.com.au/news/2022/08/18/lamborghini-driver-found-not-guilty-over-pedestrian-death
• https://globalnews.ca/video/3873815/driver-found-not-guilty-of-killing-pedestrian-on-leslieville-sidewalk

I think it happens even more when it comes to cyclists being killed by drivers

Are you thinking of something like Stack Overflow’s reputation system? See https://stackoverflow.com/help/whats-reputation for a basic overview. See https://stackoverflow.com/help/privileges for some examples of privileges unlocked by hitting a particular reputation level.

That system is better optimized for reputation than the threaded discussions that we participate in here, but it has its own problems. However, we could at minimum learn from the things that it does right:

• You need site (or community) staff, who are not constrained by reputation limits, to police the system
• Upvoting is disabled until you have at least a little reputation
• Downvoting is disabled until you have a decent amount of reputation and costs you reputation
• Upvotes grant more reputation than downvotes take away
• Voting fraud is a bannable offense and there are methods in place to detect it
• The system is designed to discourage reuse of content
• Not all activities can be upvoted or downvoted. For example, commenting on SO requires a minimum amount of reputation, but unless they’re reported as spam, offensive, fraudulent, etc. (which also requires a minimum reputation), they don’t impact your reputation, even if upvoted.

If you wanted to have upvoted and downvoted discourse, you could also allow people to comment on a given piece of discourse without their comment itself being part of the discourse. For example, someone might just want to say “I’m lost, can someone explain this to me?” “Nice hat,” “Where did you get that?” or something entirely off topic that they thought about in response to a topic.

You could also limit the total amount of reputation a person can bestow upon another person, and maybe increase that limit as their reputation increases. Alternatively or additionally, you could enable high rep users to grant more reputation with their upvotes (either every time or occasionally) or to transfer a portion of their rep to a user who made a comment they really liked. It makes sense that Joe Schmo endorsing me doesn’t mean much, but King Joe’s endorsement is a much bigger deal.

Reputation also makes sense to be topic specific. I could be an expert on software development but be completely misinformed about hedgehogs, but think that I’m an expert. If I have a high reputation from software development discussions, it would be misleading when I start telling someone about hedgehogs diets.

Yet another thing to consider, especially if you’re federating, is server-specific reputations with overlapping topics. Assuming you allow users to say “Don’t show this / any of my content to at all,” (e.g., if you know something is against the rules over there or is likely to be downvoted, but in your community it’s generally upvoted) there isn’t much reason to not allow a discussion to appear in two or more servers. Then users could accrue reputation on that topic from users of both servers. The staff, and later, high reputation users of one server could handle moderation of topics differently than the moderators of another, by design. This could solve disagreements about moderation style, voting etiquette, etc., by giving users alternatives to choose from.

Right? It’s weird how so many people upset about the situation in this thread are incapable of explaining why it’s a problem without lying.

Like, I get that it sucks to be removed as a maintainer because of something outside your control. But being, or continuing to be, a maintainer of a project isn’t a right that’s integral to that project being free.

I'd honestly even consider it a good idea for Russia to get the FSF to fight this considering it's a blatant violation of the GPL.

How is telling someone that you won’t accept their contributions anymore a violation of the GPL?

Literally none of those freedoms were impacted. Everyone is still free to use the program as they wish, fork it, make changes, etc.. Linux doesn’t have a new license that says “anyone but Russians” can use it.

he then followed up by gloating about Russian maintainers

How did he gloat? He explained the change. If your complaint is that he was abrasive, I feel like you’re not familiar with Linus.

Ok, lots of Russian trolls out and about.

It's entirely clear why the change was done, it's not getting
reverted, and using multiple random anonymous accounts to try to
"grass root" it by Russian troll factories isn't going to change
anything.

And FYI for the actual innocent bystanders who aren't troll farm
accounts - the "various compliance requirements" are not just a US
thing.

If you haven't heard of Russian sanctions yet, you should try to read
the news some day.  And by "news", I don't mean Russian
state-sponsored spam.

As to sending me a revert patch - please use whatever mush you call
brains. I'm Finnish. Did you think I'd be *supporting* Russian
aggression? Apparently it's not just lack of real news, it's lack of
history knowledge too.

Sounds a lot more like he’s frustrated than delighted to me.

Calling your former volunteer contributors bots

He didn’t call the contributors bots.

He called the people submitting reverts and complaining about those maintainers, who weren’t contributors themselves, “troll farm accounts.”

and state assets because of their home country

When did he call anyone a state asset? To be clear, being a troll or a paid actor doesn’t make you someone’s property.

He also explained that this was a legal matter:

> Again -- are you under any sort of NDA not to even refer to a list of
> these countries?

No, but I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to go into the details that
I - and other maintainers - were told by lawyers.

I'm also not going to start discussing legal issues with random
internet people who I seriously suspect are paid actors and/or have
been riled up by them.

First, you’re acting like the decision was made by Linus or another member of the team and that they weren’t following the law.

Second, even if that weren’t the case, it’s still completely free. Unless you can name one of the following freedoms that was impacted by those actions:

• Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose.
• Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish.
• Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor.
• Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits.

What “not at all free dogmas” are you referencing, and why is “free” in scare quotes?

Is this the context for that? https://www.advocate.com/election/2019/9/20/kamala-harris-denying-gender-affirmation-surgery-trans-inmates